"The two essays in this report highlight ways in which two global authoritarian powers, Russia and China, provide surge capacity to kleptocratic networks in Africa. In his essay J.R. Mailey dissects the Wagner Group’s illicit activities in key pa
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rts of Africa. The Wagner Group’s activities are complex, but Mailey zeroes in on the fact that the military support offered to African kleptocrats has little to do with providing security and stability for the African people. Rather it is focused on extracting resources, advancing geopolitical goals, and serving as a brutal cog in the authoritarian mutual support machinery. Even if the ultimate fate of the Wagner Group remains unclear, these trends are unlikely to abate. The opaque economic relationships that the Wagner Group has developed on the continent no doubt are too lucrative for the Kremlin to surrender [...] Andrea Ngombet Malewa’s essay highlights the ways in which Beijing facilitates Congo-Brazzaville’s deeply kleptocratic regime. In addition to long-standing Chinese involvement in the timber and extractive industries, Ngombet’s analysis spotlights the establishment of a Sino-Congolese Bank for Africa that could allow kleptocrats to bypass the transparency requirements of Western-linked banks, thereby affording opportunities to launder money with impunity. This development has significant implications for accountability norms worldwide." (Executive summary)
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"Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field that spans a variety of disciplines. This volume offers the first real survey of the field to date and provides a guide for the work of future scholars. It explores: "key issues of definition and of methodology, religious encounters with popular
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culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments, representations of religious traditions in the media and popular culture, including important non-Western spheres such as Bollywood." (Publisher description)
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"This book, containing 17 chapters from health communication scholars both in the U.S. and abroad, is expressly concerned with media-related aspects of AIDS. Whether that media is print, electronic, and/or visual, they lie at the heart of understanding the messages we have, or perhaps have not, rece
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ived about AIDS. This book addresses the invaluable role of communication in terms of HIV/AIDS pandemic." (Publisher description)
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"Problèmes cinématographiques d'un pays neuf — La production africaine — La contribution occidentale." (Jean-Marie Van Bol, Abdelfattah Fakhfakh: The use of mass media in the developing countries. Brussels: CIDESA, 1971 Nr. 2431, topic code 310.0)